Or, maybe there is no blame to be had and this is a learning experience for all of us. Maybe I am the one who put him into a situation that he isn’t prepared for because I didn’t do enough research. Perhaps I trusted too much and this is entirely my fault. He is still a child, with a child’s mind. He really is the kid playing Minecraft with his brother and sleeping with his baby blanket. I don’t want him to try and be something that he is not. I want him to blossom and I want him to experience new things. He is growing up, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t still under my guidance and supervision. I am the one who still thinks of him as a little baby who can’t possibly be using foul language trying to impress people. I am not OK with projecting a persona that could put him into a precarious situation that he is not ready for.īut, maybe I am the one who is not ready. That is where he can get himself into trouble. Being a kid pushing the limits is one thing. Sure, it was a long time ago, but I am not so out of touch with reality that I don’t remember some of these feelings and desires myself. I understand that adolescents experiment and they test boundaries and they challenge. Trust me, this sucks just as much for me as it does for him. His friends know he’s in trouble and that his parents are assholes, so there isn’t much back and forth anyway. He can check texts and calls in the evening and has about 15 minutes of supervised text time. I had male friends and brothers, but I wasn’t ready for my son to be in that world. It’s been a few years, but I was a teenager. He and his friends exchanging barbs about penises and grades. I braced myself for more profanity, and there it was. It was mostly Minecraft and memes, the exact things he had told us he was going to be using Reddit for. Thank God, there was nothing there of note. I was terrified to look at his search history. He apologetically surrendered his phone and went to bed. The lecture started about lying, the language, the loss of trust and respect, the pure evil that exists online and what he was opening himself up to. He was busted and there was no way to talk himself out of it. When we called our son down, he had no idea why he was in trouble.Īnd then, we dropped the bomb. My husband and I were both appalled and knew that we had to address it immediately. Yes, we say fuck in nearly every sentence, but I don’t think my lips have ever uttered the word “jizz”. Where in the hell was he learning language like that? Certainly not from his father or me. The same kid who sleeps with a special blanket from when he was a baby was asking someone if he had, “Seen the jizz master?” It honestly made me sick to my stomach. There is no other explanation other than profane. That’s not the only thing that bothered me. He was commenting like crazy - dozens of times a day, all over the place. I don’t know if my son knew it, I didn’t, but you can see a Redditor’s activity if you click on their name. He clicked on his profile and what he found was shocking. It was benign, but still against the rules. He quickly noticed our son’s username in the comments. My husband looked it up later that evening and casually started reading. He was discussing something with his dad about Lego and mentioned a forum that he was reading and the username. He’d never betray my trust.” And he didn’t. But when I looked at my son, who to me is just a baby, I thought, “Of course he’s going to be truthful. I am a special kind of naive I know that. This was after laying down ground rules, including no commenting or private messaging. It seemed innocent enough, so my husband and I said OK. We talked about what he would be using Reddit for, and he said Minecraft forums and memes. They’re young and just don’t need to be messing with that kind of stuff. I don’t allow TikTok, or Snapchat, or Facebook for my kids. Recently he asked if he could have a Reddit account. As the oldest myself, I know it can suck, but he takes it in stride. And rarely complains about his birth order. Whether he wants to be or not, he is the guinea pig for everything from sleep training techniques to social networking, and every teeny tiny thing in between. My oldest is 13 and he is our trailblazer.
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